Vice President Dick Cheney’s trip throughout the Middle East last week found him in Israel on Easter — he joined thousands of pilgrims at a service in Jerusalem — but his visit there was no holiday.
During his three days in Israel, Cheney met with Israeli and Palestinian officials, voiced the Bush administration’s continued support for the Jewish state, urged all sides in the Middle East peace process to make further concessions and criticized two belligerent governments in the region.

Even as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in the Mideast last week prodding the Olmert government to negotiate with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, an Israeli expert on the PA and terrorism asserted here that Abbas is “irrelevant” and represents only “a fig leaf for legitimacy.”

Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Let me see if I’ve got this right.
The Obama administration wants to move Israeli-Palestinian talks directly into “final status” issues, which in case you missed the memo are issues so difficult to resolve that they were reserved for the last stage of negotiations.

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
There’s been a lot of hype written about the Obama administration’s Middle East plans – everything from the claim the president is planning to impose a full-blown plan on the reluctant Israelis and Palestinians to the idea he’s been totally outfoxed by an Israeli Prime Minister much too sly for him.

As he visits Israel this week for the second time in four months, President George W. Bush has scaled down his expectations for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
Instead of the optimism he displayed late last year when he spoke of the creation of a Palestinian state before he left office, Bush told Israeli journalists Monday that he was hoping the two sides could “get a state defined by the end of my presidency.”

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s future could lie in the hands of a millionaire Long Island rabbi and businessman who is reportedly set to testify as early as this week that he gave bribes to Olmert while Olmert served as Jerusalem’s mayor from 1999 to 2002.

Israel mounted a major public relations and military offensive this week both to deny Palestinian charges that it was responsible for the Gaza beach explosion that killed eight civilians last Friday and to answer a barrage of Kassam rockets Hamas fired into southern Israel following the beach deaths.

For the first time, a son of Safed is prime minister. All right, so Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is the Palestinian prime minister, but Israelís fate is in his hands as much as anyoneís. When he insists that peace depends on Israel recognizing the Arab right of return, heís talking about himself and heís talking about Safed.

Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Over at Foreign Policy, the diligent Laura Rozen has an interesting blog item on Barack Obama’s Jimmy Carter problem.
Rozen cites a Fox News report that the former president will press the administration to take Hamas off the U.S. terrorist list; whether or not the report is true, it’s not news this administration wants to hear as it walks multiple tightropes in its intensifying Middle East diplomacy.